Honk Honk!

A side blog for me to blogpost about my mead.

[clown-mead]

What to do with all of the leftover fruit from your family's Christmas party? Make p̶r̶i̶s̶o̶n̶ ̶w̶i̶n̶e̶ a fruit medley mead! I took a few Tupperware containers home and decided to see what would happen.

○ 3.7 oz white grapes

○ 3.5 oz red grapes

○ 7.4 oz strawberry

○ 7.5 oz pineapple

○ 4.0 oz watermelon

○ 1/4 orange, squeezed and zested

○ ~2.5 lbs honey (my scale turned off and I eyeballed the last half of the pour)

○ 1 pack Lalvin D47 yeast

Mash all fruit together, add some water, do your best to dissolve the honey. Activate and pitch the yeast, then add water to one roughly one gallon.

The first gravity reading was taken ~48 hours after pitching the yeast. If it's reliable, this should end up at around 12.5% abv

[clown-mead]

Bottled my last other half gallon of peach mead. This container gave me a scare a few weeks ago when it looked like the peaches got infected. Turns out I just failed to stabilize this vessel properly and it started fermenting again. Which is odd because the other half gallon that I started (from the same primary gallon as the other peach vessel) stayed stable throughout the whole process.

The condition of the peaches at the end taught me a couple of things. For starters, cubing the peaches may have been the better way to go to prevent them from floating and causing so much of a cap. Another is to actually use a brew bag with weights to guarantee the fruits stay under the water line and don't get exposed to air. And finally, a batch isn't infected until it definitely looks infected.